Macbeth is one of the most commonly staged Shakespeare plays on this island: over the past five years there have been at least five significant productions, including one this spring by Second Age Theatre, the Abbey Theatre production in 2010, a production by Selina Cartmell in 2008, and Replay’s performance of the play at the Crumlin Road Gaol in 2007, not to mention two visits of the Polish Teatr Biuro Podrozy's palimpsest What Bloodied Man is That and Opera Ireland’s rendering of Verdi’s opera in 2009. Each of these offers a new perspective on the play, and Lynne Parker’s production at the Lyric is no exception. Beautifully designed and performed by an excellent cast, this version offers another engaging and challenging interpretation that creates a strong atmosphere of moral and political decay. The horror of Macbeth’s rule of Scotland is communicated in the harsh comfortless set and a series of directorial decisions by Parker.

One of these decisions is the visible multi-roling by the three actors playing the weird sisters: Eleanor Methven, Carol Moore, and Claire Rafferty. As the witches, they are unsettling figures in long shapeless military parkas with hoods that extend down over their faces. Their voices echo, distorted; they disappear in crashes of thunder and flashes of lightening; they conjure the spirits of the dead, and they follow Banquo’s ghost, smirking at Macbeth’s terror. However, they remove their witches’ costume on stage to appear in other guises: as servants, soldiers, and minor figures in his entourage. They are therefore with him all the time, shadowing his movements and inhabiting his household, and making visible and embodied the evil that he embraces in the pursuit of his ambitions. Together with Lady Macbeth (Andrea Irvine), they raise questions about the text’s identification of women with evil and with the seductive draw of political power.

As Lady Macbeth, Irvine is iron-willed and ruthlessly courageous, employing a mixture of bullying and coaxing to goad Macbeth to action. Her frustration with his reluctance is convincing and powerful in its everyday banality: they are like any contemporary couple. Stuart Graham offers a precise and controlled portrait of Macbeth as increasingly cruel as his guilt and horror maddens him. Together, they portray a mutually supportive, long-standing couple, tragically destroyed by the witches’ prophecy and their hunger for greatness.

The set design splits the stage into two levels connected by jagged slate steps, with the upper level covered in gravel that crunches beneath the feet of the performers and casts up little clouds of dust which adds to the tense, sinister atmosphere. The lower level is dominated by the presence of a long dining table, used in a range of ways by the performers but creating something of an obstacle to be negotiated. At either end of the stage is a structure with doors, reminiscent of a military watch-tower. The costumes and props suggest a stylized 1940s at times, but in general the design creates a timeless contemporary space with little to anchor it to any precise period. The world created by this set is harsh and comfortless: there are no soft corners or surfaces; the gravelled area has a hard wooden bench and scrubby vegetation and even the trees that walk to Dunsinane are sparse and bare of leaves.

The lighting and sound designs build the sense of a harsh open landscape, with thunder and lightning used to cover the entrances and exits of the witches and to add a sense of gothic horror to the appearances of the ghosts. This is often visually striking – Banquo’s ghost appears drenched in blood, and the murdered Lady Macduff appears, bloodstained, with her son and Macbeth’s other victims on the raised gravel platform. The spectators’ sense of smell is engaged as well: the witches’ cauldron boils and bubbles on a gas stove, releasing an acrid smoke into the auditorium. The final charge on Macbeth’s castle comes from downstage as the soldiers clamber onto the back of the playing area and come skidding across the gravel down the steps into the interior space. The violence of this assault continues through these final scenes and into the encounter between Macbeth and Macduff, when Macbeth realizes that he is at the end of his journey.

Macbeth in Northern Ireland almost inevitably seems to comment upon the conflict of recent decades and this is no exception: Malcolm’s claiming the throne suggests at best an uneasy peace after all the futile bloodshed. This moving and evocative interpretation allows those meanings to resonate.

Lisa Fitzpatrick lectures in drama at the University of Ulster.